Faith (25 page)

Art said, “I love him, too.”

A
ND AFTER
that night something shifted. More and more he found himself confiding in her.

One night Kath asked him, “Have you ever been in love?”

“I love God,” Art said, his heart racing. “I try to love all my parishioners. And of course I love my mother and my brother and my sister. But, no. Not in the way you mean.” He hesitated. “I've often wondered if I'm capable of it.”

Another confession he'd never before made, words he'd never said aloud.

“That must sound ridiculous to you,” he said quickly. “A man of my age. I suppose you've been in love many times.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you calling me a slut?”

“No! I only meant—”

“Relax,” she said, grinning. “I'm just messing with you.”

He hesitated a moment, paralyzed with embarrassment. Then, out of sheer nervousness, he laughed. What a relief, that laughter! What a blessed release.

“I've never been in love, either.” Her voice was small, her eyes shining. For a moment she looked no older than Aidan.

“Not with Aidan's father?” Art had never mentioned the man before; he'd never felt he had the right.

“I liked him,” she said slowly. “At the beginning anyway. He seemed different. He never came to the club. He hated that I worked there.”

“That's understandable. I suppose I'd feel the same way.” Art hesitated. “You know, as a man.”

“He wanted me to quit. And I did, for a while. I did everything he wanted. He hated my friends, so I stopped seeing them. He wanted us to move far way. We had to, he said, because every guy in San Diego had seen my tits.”

Art's face burned. Thank God, thank God for the dark.

“I was like a prisoner in that apartment,” said Kath. “He wouldn't let me go anywhere alone. The sick thing is, I liked it at first. I thought he was protecting me.”

“Maybe he was,” said Art.

“Oh yeah?” She eyed him levelly. “Like when he used to lock me in the apartment before he went to work?”

“On purpose?” Art said, aghast. “Dear God. Did you call the police?”

Kath snorted. “With what we were into? No way was I calling the cops.”

Art stared in disbelief.

“I had to get out of there. So I ran away.” She paused. “I had a friend in L.A., a girl I used to dance with. When I found out I was pregnant, I stayed with her right up to the end. I didn't want him seeing me that way.”

“You never told him?” Art said. “About Aidan?”

“Nope. He shipped out, and I went back to San Diego. Six weeks after Aidan came, I went back to work.”

Again the visions: Kath dancing. Art pushed them out of his head.

“You're embarrassed,” she said.

“Not at all.”

“Liar.” She grinned.

“Okay, a little embarrassed.”

A long silence.

“But I'm wondering, too. Being a mother—” He broke off. “Didn't you consider some other kind of work?”

“Like what? Brain surgery?” She shifted in her chair. “I had a kid to support. How else was I going to make that kind of money? Eight hundred a night?”

“That much?” Art said, astounded. “For dancing?”

She explained it then: the VIP room in the back, the curtained booths where customers paid extra for private dances.
Lap dances.
He was too embarrassed to ask what exactly that entailed. Later, alone in bed, a hundred questions filled his mind. What did Kath wear while lap dancing? Was the man's lap clothed, or exposed? If his life depended on it, he could not have worked up the nerve to ask.

Night after night in the dim kitchen. The confidences exchanged. Then one Thursday Kath came home late. For nearly two hours Art waited. Finally, at just before midnight, he heard her car at the curb.

“Where were you?” he demanded. “I was worried.”

“I had a meeting.”

“Hours ago. Where have you been?”

“I ran into an old friend. We stopped out to hear a band.”

“You went to a bar.”

Her smile faded. “I'm not using,” she said flatly. “I haven't touched the stuff in donkey's years.”

Donkey's years.
It was what his own mother—our mother—might have said. Art thought of the old apartment in Jamaica Plain, high above the neighborhood noise, Mrs. Ruocco's grandchildren, the boisterous Sullivans. His childhood before Ted McGann had muscled into their lives. Ma tired, always, from the long shifts at Raytheon, but still dressing for the dances on a Friday night, her hair in rollers, a cigarette burning in an ashtray. Ma had been just like Kath Conlon: just that avid, and lonely, and young.

S
UMMER CAME.
With school ended, Aidan spent whole days at the rectory, a fact noticed and commented upon. Once, at a council meeting, Kay Cleary made a snide comment about
Father Breen's kindergarten.
Art ignored the jibe. For the first time he understood that summer vacation was a hardship for working parents, a fact that had never occurred to him. It made him wonder what else he'd failed to notice, just how blind he'd been to the difficulties of his people's lives.

“I wish I could go with you,” Kath often said when he planned their excursions. And finally, on the last Thursday of August, she did.
It's my kid's birthday
, she told Chris Winter, who gave her the day off. To join Art and Aidan for an afternoon at Nantasket Beach.

They set out after lunch, with a cooler full of drinks and snacks. Art had bought a pair of swim trunks for the occasion. At the back of his closet he'd found a pair of flip-flops, a garish Hawaiian shirt he'd bought on a dare in Miami, where he'd traveled one year for a pastoral conference. For a man who dressed always in black, this bright getup felt like a costume, a kind of reverse camouflage.

At Nantasket Beach they parked and unloaded the car. Driving east into the bright sun, he'd been dogged by a creeping sense of déjà vu, but it wasn't until Kath called to Aidan—
Help Father with the cooler!
—that he recognized the scene from his own childhood. How strange, how disorienting, to find himself in the man's seat, driving, when in his mind he was still the little boy.

The morning was bright, the beach crowded. Kath spread out the flowered quilt she'd taken from her bed. She kicked off her sandals and squealed delightedly as she dug her toes into the sand. Toes small and plump like a child's, the nails painted metallic blue.

She pulled her T-shirt over her head, a moment Art had anticipated. He'd rehearsed in his mind the proper way to react. Turning away slightly, feigning some busyness with the umbrella Fran had insisted they bring, he sensed rather than saw her breasts and bare belly, her shoulders and thighs. The individual parts were much as he'd pictured them, and yet he was unprepared for the effect in aggregate.

(Ted McGann whistling:
That right there was worth the trip
.)

When at last her back was turned, he allowed himself to study this neutral part of her, the long, smooth plane of it, the slight indentations on either side of her lower spine. He slipped off his shirt. On the crowded beach he was like any middle-aged man in swim trunks; no one could see that he had prised away the cold cataphract of the priesthood, the invisible armor that had imprisoned him for years.

Art sat quickly, his duffel bag in his lap. At that moment Aidan ran to him squealing. “Can I? Iggy used to let me.”

(Iggy, he'd told Art, had been Mom's friend in San Diego. But she didn't like him anymore.)

Nimbly he straddled Art's shoulders. “Take me for a ride!”

Kath laughed silently, a trick of the wind: a stiff breeze blowing the sound out to sea.

Art had never been so close to a woman wearing so little. That the woman was beautiful and dear to him, that he'd told her things he'd never told a living soul: this would have been more than enough even without the dreamlike echo of another moment, equally potent. For it seemed to him, the whole day long, that both reels were rolling at once, his boyhood and manhood, the indelible past and achingly tangible present. The boy he'd been and the man he was; the woman he couldn't look at and the child clambering over him.

The afternoon was rife with such moments. It seemed to him, later, that in those hours he lived many lives. He watched Aidan race up and down the beach like a crazed gerbil, Kath preening like a cat, dozing in the sun. Once, twice, she rose and stretched, strolled languidly in the direction of the bathhouse. “I'll be back in a minute,” she said.

Art watched her go, grateful for his mirrored sunglasses. All day long he'd felt it. Now it struck with full force.

What a man feels.

At one time the choice had seemed binary: he could become a man, or become a priest. He'd felt, for various reasons, that he had a better shot at the latter. And it wasn't entirely welcome news—he wasn't entirely overjoyed—to discover he was both.

T
HEY ATE
fried clams for dinner, then packed up the car. Stuck in beach traffic, they amused themselves with the radio. Art's was preset to the classic rock station, a fact that delighted Kath.

“What did you expect?” he asked. “Gregorian chant?”

A bright patter of talk and commercials; then came the first familiar strains of strings and piano.

“Oh,” said Kath. “I love this song.”

A little shyly at first, Art sang along:
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.
He stole a sideways glance, expecting an ironic smirk. Kath stared at him in wonderment.

“Wow,” she said. “You can sing.”

“All priests sing.”

“Not like that.” Kath eyed him shyly. “You could have been—I don't know, a Beatle or something.”

Art burst into laughter.

“I'm serious,” she said. “You could have been a star.”

She leaned forward and fiddled with the dial. “Enough with the sad songs.” She dialed past a jazz station, country, NPR. “All right, rock star. How about this?”

“Piece of cake.” And in his best falsetto he began:

In the still of the night I hear the wolf howl honey

Sniffing around your door

It wasn't anything Father Dowd would have applauded; it wasn't singing, it was howling. Art had spent a thousand hours alone in the car cutting up with the radio. Never in his life had he imagined doing it for an audience. Kath clapped delightedly. And at the ripe age of fifty Art learned what other males discovered at puberty, the reason teenage boys join bands in the first place.

I
T WAS
nearly dark when they turned on to Fenno Street. Art parked in front of the house. Aidan snored softly in the backseat.

“I can't believe he slept through that,” said Art.

“He's used to it. I play music all the time.” Kath looked over her shoulder. “I hate to wake him.”

“Let me,” Art said, getting out of the car.

He reached into the backseat and took the boy in his arms. Aidan stirred, mumbled, settled against him. I am touching a child, Art thought, but the thought did not alarm him. He was part of the universe of caring adults; he was no Fergus. In a moment of rare clarity he understood the difference.

Moment of grace.

He carried the boy inside to his bed. “You get him settled,” he whispered to Kath. “I'll unpack the car.”

Outside he opened the trunk; he took out the kite, the sandy blanket, Kath's quilted bag. As he lifted it a bottle rolled out, amber plastic. Squinting, he held it close to the dim trunk light. Without his glasses he could scarcely make out the label:
Althea Ferguson Oxycodone 10 MG Take as needed for pain.

He waited for Kath in the kitchen.

“Who is Althea Ferguson?”

She stared at him blankly.

“A friend of yours?” Art produced the bottle from his pocket. “I suppose she must be, since her medication was in your bag.”

Kath's face closed. “You went through my stuff?”

“I did not. It rolled out of your bag.” He stared at her, waiting. “Well?”

“Yeah. Althea. I picked up her medicine for her. So what?”

“I've known a few Altheas in my life. Not one of them was younger than eighty. You have many friends that age?”

She did not respond.

“Kathleen?”

“All right. Fine. It's Oxy.”

“I know exactly what it is.” He had seen a news report on television: Hillbilly heroin, they called it. Addicts crushed the pills, then smoked or injected it. Pharmacies wouldn't keep it in stock, for fear of being robbed.

“Where did you get this?” he demanded.

“Some guy at the beach. I didn't go looking for it.”

He thought of her walking off toward the bathhouse, not once but twice. He'd been so distracted by her body that he'd never guessed she was going to score drugs.

“So a total stranger just offered you a bottle of OxyContin?”

“He wasn't a stranger. I knew him in high school, okay?” She met Art's gaze. “I was different then. I'd do anything.”

“Did you pay for this?”

The smirk returned. A contemptuous look, he thought, disdainful of his ignorance. “I never pay.”

He saw that she was boasting, daring him to wonder what she'd done instead, what favors she'd offered as payment. Hoping, through shock and titillation, to distract him. But Art would not be deterred.

“Have you taken these before?”

“No,” Kath said.

His mind raced. She had betrayed his trust, probably not for the first time. If she wasn't using now—
if!—
she would be soon enough. He thought of the boy asleep in his arms, Aidan at the mercy of a drug-addled mother. An intolerable situation; he would not tolerate it. But what, exactly, could he do? The drug was not illegal; was there any point in calling the police? He thought fleetingly of his brother, who still had friends on the force. Mike would know what to do.